Rogue Element

The aircraft was now descending. Suryei glanced at Joe, asleep in the seat beside her. She’d given up trying to analyse her feelings for him, and they’d both needed the intimacy while recovering at a facility she guessed was in Hawaii. At first it had been painful, even difficult, finding positions to make love that didn’t aggravate either her injuries or Joe’s, especially when they’d had to find out-of-the-way places for privacy.

The bandages were off her forearms now. The burns had been worse than she’d thought. They’d given her skin grafts at the hospital and the results were astonishing. Another week and it would be difficult to see how badly she’d been burned. She saw in her mind the flames that had caused the injury, but the truly ghastly details had been packed way down deep in her subconscious where the nightmares lived.

Both Suryei and Joe had contracted a mild case of malaria in the jungle, fortunately the kind with no long-term effects or damage that couldn’t be treated easily with drugs. A few of Joe’s scratches had become septic, but even the nastiest of them was now healing well.

For Joe, not surprisingly, the broken rib was causing the most problems. The bullet had torn up the muscles in his shoulder pretty badly when it had exited, and he still grimaced when he moved the wrong way. It would be a good three months with plenty of physio before he was fully fit and back in the gym.

Joe and Suryei had seen the papers from Australia while they were recovering. The pictures of the two ‘survivors’ were everywhere. The woman playing her was pretty. The man had an ear missing, an injury the papers said was sustained in the crash.

Joe’s clever idea to take their names off the passenger list would allow them to return to some semblance of a normal life. Suryei gazed out the window. She went overseas so often that her friends no longer asked where she was going or when she’d return. And these days she worked freelance, so there was no employer to answer to. But her family could prove difficult. They’d been worried sick about her and would be waiting at Arrivals. When Suryei had phoned her parents to let them know she was still alive, they had first gone into shock. Anger had followed. Then joy. They’d thought she was dead. The itinerary she’d left them had listed QF-1 as her outbound plane. Qantas had refused to tell them whether their daughter was in fact a passenger on the flight, but Suryei’s silence had confirmed their worst fears.

Suryei’s explanation of all this had been thoroughly constructed and rehearsed beforehand. She would say that she had changed arrangements at the last minute, getting on an earlier flight with a different carrier. At Bangkok, she’d headed straight for the jungle. She’d still be there, deep in the hills with her camera, if not for an accident with a kerosene lamp that had burned her forearms. She’d known nothing about the Qantas plane until she’d returned to Bangkok. She had then called her parents immediately, knowing they’d be worried.

The Australians and Americans at the recovery facility had provided both Joe and Suryei with relevant hotel and credit card accounts and receipts to cover their last couple of weeks. Their flight details had been amended on the Australian immigration server. Suryei had even been supplied with rolls of film exposed with rare shots of wildlife unique to the jungles of Thailand. Her story would stack up.

Joe’s was not as tight, but then it didn’t have to be. He had no one close enough to worry about him, just a father who lived in Perth, on the other side of the country. If anyone asked, he would say that he’d decided to holiday in Malaysia, travelling up to Thailand instead of going to England. A last-minute change of plans. He’d done that plenty of times before. No big deal. What’s all the fuss about?

In a month they’d both be taking up work in the US. Joe had been ‘offered’ a job within the NSA at their HQ in Maryland. Suryei had also signed with the local bureau of a national news service they both suspected of being just another strand of the NSA’s intelligence-gathering net. They had been given time to get their things in order and would be back on a plane again in a month’s time. Suryei made a mental note to check whether going to the States by sea was possible.

The aircraft lurched as the flaps extended fully. Suryei’s hand unconsciously went to the Bic lighter suspended on a simple silver chain from her neck. As she’d promised herself, she’d made it into a good luck charm. She rubbed her fingers against the smooth plastic and slowly rolled the friction wheel under her thumb, finding the action reassuring.

There were plenty of instances of people who had missed planes, trains or boats, and had avoided death because of it. And just like them, Suryei would marvel at her lucky escape. She smiled at the thought. Very few people would ever know exactly how close to the truth that was.